Program #41, February 22 2001: Unthemed.

In this first unthemed program since I did the show with the randomly chosen playlist, I was still grappling with many of the same ideas I was trying to work out then (you may notice some of the same albums are used in both programs). I did decide on a true From Cats to Dogs approach this time, though, one originally intended to culminate in Schoenberg's original version of Pierrot Lunaire and Larry Austin's reformulation of the same material.

However, I had two little epiphanies during the first hour that induced me to change the plan halfway through. First, I realized some of the thinking I've been doing lately about my own involvement in composition (or, lack thereof) was leaching out really strongly in the way I put together part of this evening's playlist. It came to me that the section of it running from the Ives through to the Alexander -- which segued more by texture than by anything else, a sign that something deeper was organizing my choices -- if "averaged out" between the pieces probably falls fairly near the central tendencies of my own compositional impulses. After that, I wasn't really sure that I wanted to continue with the playlist I'd originally planned, especially since I'd already been thinking that the two Pierrot pieces really needed to be in their own program (or programs: I'm still thinking about how best to do this); once I was clear that I was in the middle of a playlist that seemed to have more to do with my navel-staring about wanting to compose, rather than anything else, I definitely wanted to delay them to some other time when they could be a bit more central to the business at hand. So, the Pierrot pieces are delayed indefinitely... and, after talking a little about this, I reconstructed the playlist on the fly, continuing with a number of pieces for flute, piano, percussion, and electronics (in various combinations) in a way that continued the From Cats to Dogs approach. Finally, at the end, I tacked on a brief Pierrot-derived snippet from Mel Powell, as kind of an IOU regarding future broadcast of the Pierrot material.